One Of Those Days

Sometimes, it is an actual challenge to get out of bed every day — to even just throw on some jeans, make a cup of coffee and sit in your living room instead of nestled under your literal and metaphorical security blankets. Hiding is so much easier than putting on a brave face, saying no to fear, saying no to insecurities — saying no to the lies.

Today was one of those days, one of the days where you just wake up and cry for any number of reasons. I thought to myself, “gosh, I just want to drive away to the mountains, stand and scream at the top of my lungs.” Then it occurred to me, that probably wouldn’t be the best idea, in fact it would only serve to amplify my “problems.” Instead, I popped open the devo I should have done last night; it was accompanied by Psalm 23. What a classic, right?

In this Psalm [Ps. 23: 1-4] it says:

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures.

He leads me beside still waters.

He restores my soul.

He leads me in paths of righteousness

for his name's sake.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil,

for you are with me;

your rod and your staff,

they comfort me.”

As I lay there, in my obscenely grumpy stupor, after reading this verse, I thought “You need to receive those promises.” There are at least 7 separate promises, right there, in the first 4 verses. After kind of giving myself a pep talk, I got up, grabbed a pair of jeans off the floor and went downstair to make myself a cup of some French Press, Ethiopian goodness. Granted, I was still pretty grumpy, but sometimes we’ve gotta celebrate the small victories like dirty jeans and coffee.

While I stood there, another thought popped into my head, something I had written about over the summer.

In another blog post, I gave the analogy of someone stealing money from you; $10 out of your $5,000 to be exact.

If you had $5,000 and someone stole $10 from you, you wouldn’t throw away the $4,990. The money is still good. You can still use it, after all, they only took $10. Think about time in the same way. You have 1140 minutes every single day to do with as you please, if you lose 10 minutes for some reason, why the heck would you throw away the rest of the 1130 minutes? They’re still good.

Oh, but I don’t know so-and-so, they’re the worst. I don’t know what your boss said about you. I don’t know who you lost. I don’t know your big tragedy, but I do know that every single day we have a choice. We can either choose to lose ourselves and our time and our brain power and our willingness to get out of bed, or we can choose to put our big kid underwear and look those lies in the face and tell them they cannot steal our joy.

We get to choose how we live; you can live joyful or hide in your bed. It’s not easy, like at all, but everything seems to get better when we’re focusing on our promise rather than our problem.

Live today with beauty in mind and the thrill of hope as your passion. You are amazing and your time is so worth your care.